Jonestown Wasn't Kool-Aid — It Was Cyanide-Laced Flavor Aid, and 909 People Died

Jim Jones founded the Peoples Temple as a small interracial Pentecostal congregation in Indianapolis in 1955, moved it to Northern California in 1965, and built it into one of the most racially integrated megachurches in the United States. The membership reached the low thousands at its peak. Through the 1970s, Jones became increasingly paranoid, abusive, and deeply addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates. He started talking publicly about racist conspiracies against the Temple and about a coming nuclear war from which only Temple members would emerge alive.

In 1977, Jones relocated the community to Jonestown — the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project — a 4,000-acre site leased from the government of Guyana in the country's northwestern jungle. About a thousand Temple members eventually moved there. Family members of those Temple members began appealing to the U.S. Congress to investigate. Congressman Leo Ryan of California flew to Jonestown on November 17, 1978, with a small delegation of journalists and concerned family members.

On the afternoon of November 18, after a tense day of interviews, several Temple defectors asked to leave with Ryan's group. At the Port Kaituma airstrip seven miles away, a group of armed Temple members attacked the boarding planes, killing Ryan, three journalists, one defector, and wounding nine others. Back at Jonestown, Jones gathered the community around a metal vat. The vat contained grape-flavored Flavor Aid laced with potassium cyanide and several sedatives. Mothers were ordered to give their children the drink first. Adults followed; some were injected when they refused. Jones, the last to die, was shot in the head; whether by his own hand or someone else's has never been definitively settled. The death toll was 909, including 276 children. Until September 11, 2001, it remained the largest deliberate loss of American civilian life in a single event in American history.